Has It All Started To Change?

Just a quick observation about our Dealer in Chief.

A lot of his promises turn out to be empty,  especially when he makes a deal that says “you give me this now and I’ll do stuff for you later.” Think contractors who don’t get paid or municipalities that give tax breaks to hotels that go bankrupt.  Our courts are littered with lawsuits against his companies that fit those categories.

Now, it looks like the Republican Party has gotten a good look at his negotiating style, with an agreement that says “we’ll put up with your nonsense, at least for a while. Meanwhile, you will give us an end to Obamacare and tax cuts for the rich and an end to government regulations of our industries.”

Well, Obabacare is still here, although it certainly needs some repair, and the President is talking about working with Democrats to do it - not what the GOP wanted. And it looks like his efforts at big tax cuts won’t get through Congress either, not with some Republicans already worrying about growing budget deficits.

Cut environmental regulations? Well, there seems to be a basic rule of capitalism that says if its cheaper and better to build a solar farm or wind turbines to produce electric power, coal plants will not be coming back. And, even if they do, open pit mining and automation will limit the number of new jobs in the field.

So, if you are in the House of Representatives and are watching Trump’s poll numbers sink and sink and sink some more, and you feel you won’t get any of the things he promised to give you, how do you save yourself?

Keep supporting him over the desires of the people you need to vote for you? In one word - Nyet.

So, What Happens Next?

Let me start with a disclaimer. No one knows what will happen next in Washington, because there are so many players who want different things, and because the ever-changing whims of our new President move too fast for most of his desires to gain any traction.

But, there are some things we know. Let’s call them facts. And there are some things we can reasonably assume, and there are even some things which fit neatly into the “probably” category.

So, let me give you two versions of the likely future events in Washington. The fast version and the slow version.

We’ll start with fast. Someone is at fault. Someone is to blame. The target has to be someone relatively high up in government, and someone who is not related to Donald Trump by birth or marriage. Or who he likes on the radio or Fox news.

No, the likely target will be someone who has praised the president for his wisdom and negotiating ability, and who have made sacrifices to help him. Why? Just two words: Chris Christie.

We can also rule out putting the blame on low-level people. Not even President Trump will believe that the late-night capitol cleaning crew just left a copy of a health care plan on every Republican’s desk after being paid $25 each by Nancy Pelosi, although I did hear someone in a position to know say that such a thing was still possible and should be investigated by the FBI or a bipartisan Republican-led congressional committee.

No, the fall guy - darned few women to blame this on - has to be someone who has voted dozens of times to get rid of the Affordable Care Act and promised the president he was ready to repeal and replace it. “Go ahead, Mr. President,” he probably said. “You can promise the American people that you will do it on on your very first day in office, or the first day you get back from your first vacation at Mar-a-Largo.”

Give you a hint who I think it will be. He’s Irish, and when he is gone, there will be lots of  others in Congress who can move up the status chain, gaining power and some very nice pay increases. And, here’s the best part  - Trump doesn’t have to do anything complicated like rigging a no-confidence vote in the House of Representatives. All  he has to do is twitter something like “Let Down by Ryan. Tragic” and the avalanche will be started. Going downhill fast in Washington these days is easy. 

So what happens next legislatively?  Well, that’s the slow version of events. Mostly because there are so many moving parts. A budget has to be presented. Committees have to hold hearings. The changes have to be evaluated and that pesky Congressional Budget Office has to throw in its two cents. 

And, we all know what happens when special interests find their cash cow being milked by someone else or, worse, led off to the slaughterhouse. You can cut the budget of the National Institutes of Health and no one will complain unless a real disaster hits the nation or their uncle catches a rare disease. 

Or, you can cut the state department budget to the bone and no one will say a word until, suddenly, those canny Russians or those even cannier Chinese start gaining influence and business deals in what has traditionally been our part of the world. Even worse, some radical ISIS cell will attack one of our far-flung embassies which had its security budget reduced and some Democrat in Congress will yell something that sounds like “Benghazi.”

Those things will take some time to play out, especially since a week in politics is like a month in real life. It’s the same thing as measuring time in dog years. The time will seem longer that it really is.

But the budget will come. And after a while, all those newly-elected Republican governors across the country will start to realize that the federal aid they counted on to cover things like road repairs and homeless shelters will suddenly be cut or even eliminated. That should start the creative process in every state’s laboratory of democracy - how can I feed an extra 30,000 people who have lost their jobs without raising taxes?

It won’t be pretty.

And, it will be slow. Maybe Congress will do what it has already done for several years, which is to simply pass a contingency budget that keeps the United States going, but which doesn’t call for any new programs or eliminating existing ones. Maybe people will notice that.

So, sometime later this year, we are likely to see something come out of Washington that looks like change. Some things will be dropped, other things will be disguised with a name change and continued. And, the President will claim credit for all of the jobs that are being created by industries which planned to create them a year or two ago.  You see, it takes a company some time to decide to expand, then implement the changes needed to do it, and finally hire and train new people.

Maybe that’s happening now, and 2017 will turn out really great, bigly. And maybe and 2018 will look better still. That would be good news for Republicans and for President Trump. After all, it’s a deadline of sorts.

It’s an election year.

Ah, Shakespeare

Think this stuff is all new? Well, remember William Shakespeare, who had some very interesting things to say. Macbeth, act 5, scene 5.

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more: it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

Anyone want to give odds that things will change dramatically by tonight?

On Health Care, Figures Can Lie

Gamblers have a way of looking at a bet that has a good chance of winning. It’s called playing the percentages.

That means you are more likely to win by putting your money on red or black in a roulette game - eve though the payoff is small - than you are by betting on a single number, like 21 or 11. Bigger pay-off, true, but very little chance of winning. The gambling pros have a name for that too. It’s called a sucker bet.

Listen to ads for lotteries or casinos and you can hear a faint echo of sucker bets all the time. You have a lucky number. You have to be in it to win it. The odds of winning may be really high, but somebody is going to win. Sooner or later.

Sucker bets all.

Of course, there is entertainment to be had in making sucker bets. And there is a good chance you will have a few moments or a few hours - depending on whether you are betting on the roulette wheel or the state lottery - to imagine what you would do with all that new-found wealth.  I won’t argue that the dream isn’t worth the dollar or two you put down.

But what does this all have to do with politics? It’s all in the first sentence - the phrase “playing the percentages.”

This requires a bit of math to explain. But don’t roll your eyes, it’s important to know what is happening right now in Washington - and elsewhere - with people who are throwing out all kinds of facts and figures and percentages about health care.

Facts are being cherry-picked to make things look better or worse. Figures can lie (and a lot of liars figure). But the most dangerous of the three is percentages, which can easily be made to mislead people.

Huh? Well, if you look really carefully at the claims that the Affordable Care Act is about to self-destruct, and the proof is that premiums in some places have gone up 100 percent or more, you can see the misleading math huffing and puffing just under the surface.

Here’s why.

Let’s say you have a family health insurance policy that costs you $3,000 a year. (we’ll use round numbers to  make it easy to follow).  Now, say it goes up by $300 - you have seen a 10 per-cent increase in your premium. If it goes up to $6,000, that’s a hundred percent increase.

We’ll make it go up $300 again next year. Is that another ten percent increase? A hundred percent increase? No, because the base cost of the policy is now $3,300,  a 10 per-cent increase would have to be $330. A hundred percent increase would be $6,600.

Could that keep happening? Well, the annual premiums would go from $12,000 to $24,000 to $48,000 to $96,000. In just five years, they would hit $192,000, and no one would be around to buy it.

So. let’s look at what is real.

There are lots of arguments to be made about how much you have to make - and what kind of taxes you pay - to afford a $3,000 insurance premium. But, if you are bringing home $30,000 a year, you are just paying 10 percent of your income for insurance. Bring home $60,000 and it drops to 5 percent. Bring home $600,000 - you are the bank vice-president, not the teller - and you are spending one half of one percent of your take home pay on health insurance.

So when people tell you that premiums in some places have doubled or tripled under the Affordable Care Act, you shouldn’t just run around in a panic. Not until they tell you where those increases took place, and why those increases took place - in those few markets and nowhere else - and, most of all, just what those increases were. In real dollars. And who is paying them.

Say the premiums tripled from $900 a year to $2,700. That’s a lot, but its still only 10 percent of the take-home income of someone who brings in $27,000 a year. And 5 percent of someone making $54,000.

Now, I agree that the Affordable Care Act is still being phased in. It has problems, sure. And it needs some work by Congress to fix it. But most people who buy a new car and find the engine sputtering a year later will bring it in to a mechanic and have it fixed, rather than going out and buying a new car.

That’s called playing the percentages.

Suppose the Republicans Are Right

 I have been thinking a lot about President Trump’s budget proposals and the plans by the Republican majority in Congress to pass tax cuts for everybody, although most of the money would, as usual, go to the rich.

And, a little echo has been going through my mind. I hear the words over and over again. Reward the money-makers, because they create jobs and make the economy grow.

You know, they could be right. That means the only problem with the proposed budget is that it doesn’t go far enough. It’s still Obama-light when it comes to taxes, and it worries too much about revenue, which will increase automatically as soon as our new social order comes into being.

In fact, the more I think about it, the more I realize that we probably won’t need an income tax at all. Not when all those exports start flowing out of the country and the rest of the world comes running to us to buy our great - really great - ideas to get their own economies moving at the five or ten per-cent a year growth we should be seeing by 2018 or 2019 at the latest.

So, here’s my new plan. It’s based on the principals we have already accepted in Washington. And, it’s simple. You could fill out your tax form on a post card, and still have enough room left to draw a picture of Paul Ryan.

First, poverty is bad. Really bad. And we encourage it by giving tax credits - really  just a give-away to the poor - to anyone who claims to have an income below some fake news poverty line. Like anyone has ever seen that line on a paycheck.

So, I propose that we tax any individual or family who makes less than $40,000 a year on a sliding scale. They would pay the difference between what they earn and $40,000. And they can’t count welfare benefits as income.

That would give those people a real incentive to go out and get a good-paying job. Nothing like a good incentive to make people work.

Next, anyone who has an income of $40,001 to $80,000 a year would be left alone. They pay no taxes. They are the backbone of our nation, even though they, too, don’t really try hard enough.

Which comes to our third and final tax bracket. Anyone making more than $80,000 a year would get a reverse tax payment from the government. Make $160,000 and you would get a check for $80,000. Make $1,000,000 and you get a check for $920,000.

Now I know some do-good liberals will find this somewhat unfair, and some short-sighted members of the Freedom Caucus will think it might increase the national debt.

But, look what will really happen. All that off-shore money will be repatriated. And the rich will work really hard to spend their money here in ways that will increase their income. That means jobs, lots of jobs will be created. Certainly on Wall Street, at least.

So the poor will find work. The rich will make work. And the middle class will get off their middle class asses and work harder. What could be wrong with that?

Hey, you know what we should be calling the proposed Republican budget for next year? A good start.

And Reap The Whirlwind…

So, what should we make of the events of the past few days? So much uncertainty, so many lies, so little actually accomplished. And, in the end - since we all like to keep score on these things - who won and who lost?

Well, in one way, it’s really simple. President Trump lost. Bigly. Paul Ryan may have lost, but that’s not quite clear yet. Elderly Americans lost, although they may not realize it yet. And the Democrats likely lost - at least they lost an opportunity - by behaving very much the same way as Republicans acted toward them. Not a single idea of their own to show how to meet our latest crisis in government.

So, who won?

Insurance companies won, for sure. Anti-American rabble rousers in the Middle East won in a kind of an “I told you so” way. The United States Constitution won. And, if you look closely at a few green shoots of hope popping out of the ice and snow around Washington, the old, outmoded concept of bi-partisan cooperation may have scored a minor victory, although few in Congress dare speak that particular name.

As you can tell, I am a little overwhelmed and a little jaded at this point. Seen it before, done it before, and yet here it comes again. There’s an old saying about history repeating itself, first as a tragedy, then as a farce.

Let’s spell it out a bit.

First, President Obama did not order President-elect Trump’s tower - the one with his name on it in midtown Manhattan - to be wiretapped or “wire tapped.”

(As an aside, I have to add that President Trump, by arguing what the meaning of a quotation mark is, seems to be echoing Bill Clinton’s arguments about what “is” is. Just think, the two of them joined forever in a kind of lexicon of shame).

Second, the long list of lies by our current president seems to be sticking to him, kinda like the teflon wearing off. Maybe when our President - any president - says something, it should mean something.

Third, with all the sound and fury about his budget, his proposed cuts in the EPA and the State Department, and - of course - the wall and health insurance, nothing has actually happened yet. Except the price of tickets to Congressional Budget Hearings (this is only a metaphor, mind you) is going way up.

Now, who won?

Insurance companies. Does anyone of voting age in the United States actually think the government is going to put a limit on how much they can charge people. Well, they will, but allowing insurance companies to charge seven times their normal premium to the sick elderly really means they won’t charge anything, because no one will buy those policies.

Confusion won. We still believe there is a law that keeps insurance companies in one state from selling insurance in another state. Does anyone who buys an insurance policy through the AARP think there are 50 separate insurance companies selling those policies?

So A Guy Walks Into A Bar...

You can walk into a bar in almost any city or town in America - the right kind of bar, of course - and find someone who knows all the answers.

Often, they have a small crowd around them, listening and nodding their heads as he or she explains a big problem and offers an easy, obvious solution.

And it’s not a Republican or a Democratic thing. A raw meat Republican with a beer in his hand who denounces how the government is coddling the undeserving (mostly minority) lawbreakers and welfare moochers has the same act as the ultra-sophisticated liberal Democrat who sips a fine, dry German Riesling and talks about how our indifferent policies are causing so much harm to our nation and to untold people around the world.

Neither brag about their blinders. No one in the crowds that gather around them dare to argue or talk about what goes on inside their little box of issues.

But here’s the thing. You don’t go into a bar to get answers to hard problems with multiple causes and which can unleash even more and worse problems.

But that’s just what a good part of our nation is doing about health care. We’re fighting off the alligators and forgetting that the job involves draining the swamp.

Get me a shotgun right away. And forget about hiring an engineer or a guy with a bulldozer. And, hurry up, pass the ammunition and forget about an environmental impact statement on what will happen when all that water in the swamp goes running down the hill.

That’s what’s happening in Congress right now, of course. But, it’s also happening in our homes, and where we work. And, it’s in every commercial on television which urges people to “call your Congressman and let them know...”

Two of them stand out for me. One urges me to let the government know I support the President’s plan for health insurance reform, even though he hasn’t yet given us a plan. The other says taxing health insurance is wrong, and we have to get rid of the Cadillac tax. And not one person in a hundred knows what that tax is, how it works, or who pays it. Guess what - get rid of it and you do.

It’s easy to set up a straw man to blame for any problem. The long, sad record of human suffering is full of examples - from people who are labeled witches because of some crop failure or local tragedy to wars entered on some thin, often wrong pretext. And if you think that only George Bush did it, go back to the ancient Greeks or Persians, or the history of Ireland or Britain or the Middle East. Or Native American tribes or...well, turn any page in those dry and dusty history books and something is likely to shake out.

But today we are supposed to be smarter. We have computers, and we have cable news. Any show you want, any opinion you already have.

Want to know an easy way of telling if you have been sucked in by the know-it-all in the bar with the easy answers? Simple. Just try and spend five minutes articulating the other side of the argument.

Not five minutes of yelling and cursing, or making stupid and baseless claims, but a simple straightforward argument about what the other side believes and why they believe it. Something that you could actually say if you go into the other guy’s bar and not be laughed at.

Back in college, I was on our school’s debate team. We would argue a topic with other schools, and you would have to support an idea in one round and oppose it in the next round. Interesting concept.

Then, as a reporter, I covered a lot of stories where some people wanted to do something or stop something from happening, and others opposed it. And I had to find out what both sides were really talking about.

Now that I think about it, maybe going to all those meetings wasn’t necessary. Maybe all I had to do was just go to two bars. Nah, then my stories wouldn’t have given readers any facts.

Quick Watson, the Game's Afoot!

There is something wildly appropriate about the meltdown the Trump administration is suffering right now, an almost super-natural alignment of cosmic forces, forces of nature, man-made laws and treasured customs.

In short, Spring is happening.

We have, on one hand, the annual cycle of re-birth, observed by religions and marked by farmers as the time to get out and begin their cycle of planting and growing and harvesting.

We have on the other hand changing weather patterns, a decade-long progression of reports that each year is hotter than the one before, and the one before set a new world-wide record for temperatures.

We have the breaking of traditions - from President Trump not going to a Washington Correspondent’s Dinner to Congress refusing to hold hearings on an outgoing president’s choice for Supreme Court. And creating new traditions, like getting out of Washington every weekend to go to Florida. And, not once visiting Disney World.

Then there is the re-birth of a new Congress making new promises to do the things its members promised they would do when they ran for their job, and - within a few weeks - announcing quietly that most of those things can’t be done. It’s a tradition almost as old as Congress itself.

Man and Nature going through vast and powerful changes which, nonetheless, are predictable and regular and still awe-inspiring, although Washington these days is more on the “shock and awe” side of the coin. 

Now is the time to take a step back, and realize that when you look at the Trump Administration what you see is really just a reflection of what most red-blooded American males - and some females - go through every Spring.

Baseball. Pitchers and catchers reporting, and - a week or two later - the rest of the team showing up for a couple of months of Spring training.

For most fans - let’s exclude the World Series winning Cubs fans, who have an understandably different attitude - it is a time of wonder and joy and promise. Everything looks good. Everyone is healthy. All the phenoms have unlimited potential. All the returning players are in better shape than expected. And, they’re playing on wonderful green fields under clear blue skies with temperatures in the 80’s.

Joy, unlimited. Just like politics. We won. Things will be great. Let’s get started. And, they bring in the new team, which is usually made up of returning players and new people with unlimited potential.

Then, just like baseball, everything looks great. The sun shines. People applaud. The attitude in the locker room is just wonderful. Well, OK, maybe someone remembers a grudge from last year or a bad call by some umpire, but mostly things look really good. Every team expects this year to be better than the year before - just like everyone in the new administration expects their years in office will be much better than the record of their predecessor.

Then, some player gets arrested for taking part in a drunken brawl. Or someone pulls a hamstring. After a few weeks of inter-squad practice, the Grapefruit League games begin for real, as squads or half-squads go out across Florida and Arizona to meet and match and practice, over and over again, the art of hitting a ball and catching a ball and moving just a few inches to the left because of the way a batter is changing his stance.

And then, things start to happen. Usually, nothing good. Someone twists an ankle sliding into second base. A pitcher feels a vague pain in his shoulder, the one that needed two cortisone shots during the last six weeks of the regular season, when the team was fighting for the last play-off spot in their division. There’s trouble in the clubhouse. And the coach quietly wishes he could get out of Florida and check out the AA team’s players.

Do we really need to spell it all out in political terms?  Well, there’s a Coach in the White House who doesn’t admit his team has any problems, and who blames all his mistakes on someone else. He can’t get the owners to hire the assistant coaches he needs, and hasn’t even begun to stock up his farm team.

Meanwhile, the family that took over ownership of the team is badly divided between getting results now and overpaying and holding out because some other city is talking about building a new stadium. (Private funds for new infrastructure, anyone?).

And, in a couple of months the real season begins. About the same time that Congress will starting fighting over the next federal budget. And after a few months of noise and rising hopes and crushed dreams, the team that took the field looking so good will have slipped into mediocrity, and the goal will be to win as many games as last year.

We won’t even mention all the promising young players who get dropped as the team cuts back to the number of players actually allowed by baseball. Or the older players who had hoped to get in just one more year of play.

Or the promising political stars who hoped to ride this particular political revolution into a lifetime career. All they have to do is wait a year to run for the House of Representatives again and tell their voters all that they have accomplished.

Look, there are no camels wandering around the Mall. And, there are no refugees in our town. Just a very busy draft board. Hey, none of the candidates ever said we would need one of those things again!